Marginalised voices: resisting the privatisation of council housing in Glasgow

This paper explores the opposition to housing stock transfer in Glasgow in the early 1990s. Taking the position of anti-transfer campaigners, it argues that transfer can be interpreted as a form of 'privatisation' involving a profound restructuring in the role of the state in a key heartland area of welfare provision. Using interviews from housing campaigners in Glasgow, the paper argues that the much-heralded rhetoric about housing stock transfer as promoting tenant choice is highly contentious and misleading. The paper includes by highlighting that dispite the move to transfer in Glasgow, there remains a significant campaign against transfer in other parts of the UK.     

Victoria E. Dye. All Aboard for Santa Fe: Railway Promotion of the Southwest, 1890s to 1930s. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xi + 163 pp. ISBN 0-8263-3657-4, $24.95 (cloth).

All Aboard covers the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe (AT&SF)railroad’s attempts to promote tourism in the Southwest.The emphasis is on New Mexico, particularly Santa Fe and, asa separate narrative, Albuquerque. Interestingly, the AT&SFdid not pass through Santa Fe. In the 1870s, when the companyplanned a route from Dodge City, Kansas, to Colorado, whereabundant fuel could be loaded, to New Mexico then to California,the foothill town of     

THE NORTH AMERICAN BLACKOUT AND ELECTRICITY POLICY: ALTERNATIVES TO TRANSMISSION CONSTRUCTION

It is time to stop regulating the electricity industry as if it were a natural monopoly. Technology has moved on and competition must not be discouraged by regulation. Competition is not only necessary for lower prices to consumers: the particular technological developments that have taken place in recent years mean that competition can diversify supply sources and contribute to increased security of supply.     

An Analysis of the Effects of Recent Changes in the Exchange Rate and the Terms of Trade on the Level and Composition of Economic Activity

Over the eighteen-month period ending June 1986, the Australian economy experienced two major shocks: a nominal devaluation of the $A of some 28 per cent and a terms of trade decline of some 16 per cent. The effects of these influences are examined using the ORANI model of the Australian economy. The effects of the devaluation on selected macroeconomic variables and key sectoral variables are presented for various degrees of wage indexation. Effects on quota rents are calculated and compared with actual outcomes. The terms of trade decline has an adverse impact on the balance of trade and in order to offset this impact while maintaining aggregate employment demand the model calculates that both real wages and real absorption would need to be around 4 per cent less than the values they would otherwise take.     

Strategic Product Choiceand Niche Markets

This paper presents a model of strategic product choice when consumer preferences combine features of both horizontal and vertical product differentiation. Consumers disagree on what amount of a "special" characteristic makes for a better product, but those who prefer more of this attribute are willing to pay more for it. Within this demand structure, I examine the advantages of first-mover firms. I find that such firms typically do best in markets where the maximum degree of product differentiation is limited by preferences rather than technology. These are "niche markets". Follower firms do better in markets in which the range of preferences is broad relative to the span of feasible goods.     

Meeting the challenge of corporate entrepreneurship

To be competitive, companies must grow innovative new businesses. Corporate entrepreneurship, however, isn't easy. New ventures face innumerable barriers and seldom mesh smoothly with well-established systems, processes, and cultures. Nonetheless, success requires a balance of old and new organizational traits-and unless companies keep those opposing forces in equilibrium, their new businesses will flounder. The authors describe the challenges companies face when they pursue new businesses, as well as the usual problematic responses to those challenges. Such companies, they say, must perform three balancing acts: Develop strategy by trial and error, which includes narrowing potential choices, learning from small samples, using prototypes to test business models, tracking progress through nonfinancial measures, and knowing how and when to pull the plug on a new venture. Find the best combination of old and new operational processes by staffing new ventures with "mature turks", changing veterans' thinking, knowing which capabilities to develop and which to acquire, and having old and new businesses share responsibility for operating decisions. Strike the right balance of integration and autonomy by assigning both corporate and operating sponsors to new ventures, establishing criteria for handoffs to existing divisions, and using creative organizational structures. The authors provide a detailed look at IBM's Emerging Business Opportunity system, which manages all these balancing acts simultaneously.     

Taxing Large Businesses: Cooperative Compliance in Action

Intereconomics - Cooperative compliance represents a shift in thinking for tax administrations, away from a deterrence approach where taxpayers are coerced to comply with tax rules and threatened...     

Remittances,Dutch Disease,and Manufacturing Growth in Developing Economies

Remittances have grown tremendously in magnitude and economic importance in the past four decades, providing economies with additional disposable incomes and even serving as buffers against economic downturns. It is thus but fitting to ask how remittances have impacted on growth, particularly on manufacturing growth. This note presents a simple model linking remittances and manufacturing growth via a ‘Dutch Disease’ channel. Using Blundell and Bond's (1998) system general method of moments on a panel dataset of 56 developing economies from 1992 to 2016, we verify that remittances adversely affect manufacturing growth in economies that experience high real appreciation rates. This result is robust to alternate specifications, such as the inclusion of financial development indicators, the expansion of the sample to include high‐income economies, and the use of different sample periods.     

Timing the investment grade securities market: Evidence from high quality bond funds

We examine the ability of bond fund managers to shift assets between bonds and cash and across bonds of different maturities in order to capture the changes in their relative returns. As measured by estimated changes in portfolio allocations, we find strong evidence of perverse market timing ability between cash and investment grade securities, and our results indicate additional perverse timing across the bond maturity spectrum. Results are robust to an alternative performance metric. We present evidence that the survival of the majority of these funds despite their negative performance may reflect the value investors place on the portfolio diversification benefits of holding these funds.